Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in the former 11th arrondissement of Paris, on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens ^[1]. His father, Joseph-Francois Baudelaire, was a former priest turned civil servant and amateur painter, already in his sixties when Charles arrived. He died in February 1827, when the boy was five, leaving a small inheritance and a houseful of pictures that gave the child his first taste of art ^[2].

The defining rupture of his childhood came the following year. In 1828 his mother, Caroline, married Jacques Aupick, an ambitious army officer who would rise to general, ambassador, and senator. Baudelaire never forgave the remarriage. His letters to his mother, written across four decades, return again and again to the memory of the brief period when he had her to himself ^[1]. The family moved to Lyon in 1832 when Aupick was posted there, and Charles boarded at the Collège Royal, which he hated.

Back in Paris from 1836, he studied at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He was a capable student, winning a prize for Latin verse, but also a difficult one. In April 1839 he was expelled after refusing to hand over a note passed to him by a classmate, swallowing it instead ^[2]. He passed his baccalauréat later that year and announced, to his stepfather's dismay, that he intended to become a writer.

Hoping to break the young man's bohemian habits, his family put him aboard a ship bound for Calcutta in June 1841. Baudelaire abandoned the voyage at Mauritius and Réunion and was back in France by February 1842, but the months at sea left permanent deposits in his poetry: tropical light, harbors, the scent of distant islands, and the famous image of the albatross, the great seabird clumsy on deck ^[1].

On turning twenty-one in April 1842 he inherited roughly 100,000 francs from his father's estate. He spent it with spectacular speed on clothes, art, books, and lodgings on the Île Saint-Louis, cultivating the persona of the dandy he would later theorize in his essays. Within two years he had run through nearly half the capital, and in 1844 his family obtained a legal order placing the remainder under the control of a notary, Narcisse Ancelle, who doled out a modest allowance ^[2]. The arrangement humiliated Baudelaire for the rest of his life and condemned him to permanent debt.

He made his public name not as a poet but as a critic. His reviews of the Paris Salons of 1845 and 1846 announced a startlingly confident new voice in art criticism, championing Eugène Delacroix as the great painter of the age and arguing that criticism should be partial, passionate, and political ^[3]. In 1847 he published a novella, La Fanfarelle, and around the same time discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He recognized in the American a kindred mind and began the translations, published in volumes from 1856 onward, that occupied him for over fifteen years and are still read in France today ^[4].

Among Charles Baudelaire achievements one book towers over everything else. Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) appeared on June 25, 1857, published by his friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis. It gathered roughly a hundred poems written over fifteen years into a deliberately ordered architecture, moving through sections titled Spleen et Idéal, Fleurs du mal, Révolte, Le Vin, and La Mort ^[1]. The collection treated prostitution, decay, lesbian desire, Satan, and the boredom he called spleen with a formal mastery inherited from classical French verse. That collision of scandalous matter and polished alexandrines was precisely the point.

Within weeks the book was denounced in the press, and the imperial prosecutor's office charged author and publisher with offending public morality, the same office that had tried Flaubert's Madame Bovary earlier that year. Flaubert was acquitted; Baudelaire was not. On August 20, 1857, the court fined him 300 francs, later reduced, and ordered six poems suppressed ^[5]. The banned pieces could not legally be printed in France until the conviction was overturned in 1949, more than eighty years after his death ^[5].

A second, enlarged edition of Les Fleurs du mal followed in 1861, adding some thirty-five new poems, including the Tableaux parisiens section that fixed his reputation as the poet of the modern city. In these years he also perfected a second invention: the prose poem. The short pieces collected posthumously as Le Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose) abandoned meter and rhyme for a supple prose that could follow, as he put it in the dedication, the movements of a great city ^[6]. His 1863 essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne, on the illustrator Constantin Guys, coined the modern sense of the word modernité: the artist's task of extracting the eternal from the fleeting, the fashionable, the contingent ^[3].

Baudelaire never married. The central relationship of his adult life was with Jeanne Duval, an actress of Haitian descent whom he met around 1842 and supported, quarreled with, left, and returned to for two decades. She inspired the so-called Black Venus cycle of Les Fleurs du mal, some of the most sensual poems in the language ^[2]. Two other women shaped the verse: Apollonie Sabatier, hostess of a literary salon, to whom he sent anonymous poems, and the actress Marie Daubrun.

His finances were a permanent catastrophe. The 1844 legal guardianship left him dependent on an allowance, on advances from publishers, and on loans he could not repay. He moved constantly between cheap hotels, sometimes several times a year, dodging creditors ^[1]. In February 1848 he briefly appeared on the revolutionary barricades in Paris, but his political enthusiasm cooled quickly after Louis-Napoléon's 1851 coup, after which he declared himself physically depoliticized.

He contracted syphilis as a young man, probably in the early 1840s, and its long course, combined with heavy use of laudanum and alcohol, wrecked his health by middle age ^[2]. His essay collection Les Paradis artificiels (1860) examined wine, hashish, and opium with clinical fascination and moral unease, drawing partly on Thomas De Quincey's opium memoirs, which he adapted into French.

The 1860s brought recognition among younger writers but little money and no official honor. His candidacy for the Académie française in 1861 went nowhere and he withdrew it early the next year ^[1]. In 1864 he moved to Brussels, hoping to earn income from lectures and to persuade a Belgian publisher to issue his collected works. The lectures drew tiny audiences, the publishing deal collapsed, and he stayed on in the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, bitter and increasingly ill, drafting a venomous unfinished book against Belgium ^[2].

In March 1866, while visiting the church of Saint-Loup in Namur with friends, he collapsed. Within days a stroke had left him with hemiplegia and aphasia; the poet who had reshaped the French language could manage little more than a few repeated words ^[1]. His mother brought him back to Paris that summer, and he spent his final year in a nursing clinic in the rue du Dôme, visited by friends who played him Wagner, whose music he had defended in a celebrated 1861 essay.

Charles Baudelaire died in Paris on August 31, 1867, at the age of forty-six, in his mother's arms ^[1]. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery, in the family plot that already held the stepfather he had resented all his life. About sixty people attended the funeral. At his death much of his work, including Le Spleen de Paris and his intimate journals, remained unpublished; his friends Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville edited the collected works that appeared from 1868 ^[6].

Few writers have gained so much stature so fast after dying poor. Within a generation the Symbolists claimed him as their founder: Verlaine wrote an early appreciation, Rimbaud called him the first seer and the king of poets in an 1871 letter, and Mallarmé built on his sonnet Correspondances, with its idea of the world as a forest of symbols ^[5]. Through the Symbolists his methods passed to Valéry, Rilke, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote that Baudelaire had given the sordid life of the metropolis the status of first-rate poetic material ^[7].

His criticism proved almost as durable as his verse. The concept of modernité from Le Peintre de la vie moderne became a founding text for thinking about modern art and urban experience, most famously in Walter Benjamin's studies of Baudelaire and nineteenth century Paris, written in the 1930s and enormously influential on cultural criticism since ^[8]. The figure of the flâneur, the observant stroller in the crowd, entered sociology and urban studies largely through this route.

The basic Charles Baudelaire facts tell a story of posthumous vindication. The 1857 conviction was formally quashed by the French Cour de cassation in May 1949, and the six condemned poems returned to print legally ^[5]. Today Les Fleurs du mal is a fixture of the French school curriculum and among the most translated books of French poetry, and any serious Charles Baudelaire biography must reckon with a paradox he would have relished: the outlaw of 1857 is now a national classic, quoted on the metro walls of the city he made into literature.